by Alyssa Day
She did the rational, adult thing. She was Rational Rose, right?
She bolted.
14
When she turned and ran, Alejandro thought about surrendering. Hadn't the world gone to hell enough in the past eleven years, now that vampires, shape-shifters, and witches were all real? Maybe Rose Cardinal was too much for him, and he should simply raise the white flag, lie down, and surrender.
Except, he wasn't the surrendering kind.
He took a moment to enjoy the fierce rush of anticipation, and then he exploded out of his casual stance into a flat-out run, never slowing for a second as he caught up to Rose just around the side of the house, lifted her up, and threw her over his shoulder. Then he kept running, ignoring her shouts and the feel of her fists pounding on his back.
"Now," he said grimly. "We are going to have a little talk."
* * *
Rose couldn't believe it. The overbearing, arrogant, possessive, absolutely too . . . too . . . male man had thrown her over his shoulder. As if he were a primitive warrior claiming his captured princess.
Well, this princess was a witch, and it was about time he learned that in a much more up-close-and-personal manner. She narrowed her eyes as he turned left, into the entrance of the park near her house, and she cast a little spell. The tiniest of spells, really.
She made his pants disappear.
He stumbled to a halt, swearing a blistering streak of words in a string of English, Spanish, and maybe even something else, and dumped her none-too-gently on her butt on the grass. This meant that her view, front and center, was of the bountiful goodness that the goddess had graced him with, and she hadn't even planned it that way.
And from this angle, she could tell that at least part of him was definitely happy to see her. Luckily, the park was officially closed until ten, and her neighbors were rule followers, so the slight worry that a child would get the shock of a lifetime was fleeting.
Her breath caught in her throat, and she tried to ignore the thudding of her heart. Yes, he was incredibly hot, damn him. All broad shoulders, amazing rippling muscles, and dark, dangerous eyes. She tried to be mature and keep her eyes off the hard curves of his massive thigh muscles--and what stood so proudly between them--but she was having a very hard time of it.
Hard time. Oh, boy. Now her brain had melted into bad pun land.
Alejandro still wore his boots, shirt, and even his gun--in a complicated back holster --but the pants were definitely gone; oh, yes, they were.
She forced her gaze up past his impressive endowment to meet his eyes, and she licked her lips. His eyes darkened with something primal; a powerful emotion that touched the purely feminine part of her soul . When he crouched down next to her, looming over her like the predator he was, she made very certain to lean toward him, instead of away.
Never, ever let them see you're intimidated--it was the law with jungle cats, right?
"Is that what you want? Right here and now?" he challenged her. "Then strip down, because I've thought of nothing else but being inside you for every second of every minute since I met you."
Her breath hitched, and her body tightened and loosened all at once; nerve endings zinging with the electricity that had crackled between them since they’d met, even before she'd been willing to acknowledge it.
“The whole day and a half since we met?” She bit her lip, hard, against the urge to reach out and stroke him. All of him.
“Some things you just know,” he said implacably, and her heart cried out yes, yes, yes!
But her stubborn mind was still sticking with no.
Stupid mind.
She concentrated hard and made his pants reappear on his body. Then she stood up, brushed off the grass, and shook her head. “How can I trust something that happened so fast? It’s impossible.”
She walked away, leaving him standing there alone, and it was the hardest thing she’d ever done.
15
Alejandro watched the woman he’d fallen in love with walk away from him, and his world collapsed around him. She was right. It was impossible.
But it was true—a truth stronger than any he’d ever known. Maybe it was fate, maybe it was magic. He didn’t care how she labeled it.
He just knew she was his.
He went after her again, but this time he let her reach her house before he caught up to her.
“What do you want?” she asked despairingly.
“I want everything,” he growled.
He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to shake her. He wanted to fall to his knees and beg.
He started with the kiss. He backed her up against the wall, step by slow step, giving her every chance to tell him no. It would kill him if she did, but no was no.
Always.
She didn’t say it. He offered a silent prayer of thanks, because she didn’t say no.
He put his hands on either side of her head, caging her in, and she still didn’t say no. She was beautiful and defiant and strong, and she was his.
He just had to make her see it.
He stared down into her beautiful, mysterious, dangerous eyes.
"Trust this," he growled, and then he took her mouth with every ounce of passion and heat inside him.
She gasped a little, and he tasted her breath, swallowing the sound. He pulled her closer to his body, which craved her like a parched man craves crystal clear water. A roaring wave of possessiveness demanded he hold her--keep her--never let her walk away from him again.
Her hands tensed on his arms and then, gloriously, wondrously, she put them around his neck and arched her soft curves into him in a clear signal of acceptance. Surrender.
Maybe even a matching hunger.
He drove his tongue into her mouth, claiming her. A kind of insanity raged through him. She'd dared to walk away from him, taking the sunlight with her.
He had to make sure that she never would again.
Madness seized him, and he lifted her up and sat her on the coffee table, not knowing what he was doing, only knowing in some primal, predatory side of his own nature that he wanted to be even closer. He pushed her knees apart and stepped between them, sliding his hands down the soft denim of her worn jeans from knee to hip, still kissing her. His erection was so hard it hurt, and he put his hands on her ass to pull her toward him; to put his cock, though still in his pants, exactly where he needed it to be.
The clothes between them were maddening, and he knew she'd be warm and wet underneath them, but he couldn't bear to release her long enough to remove them. Madness still gripped him in its clawed and fanged grip, and he was desperate to hold her, touch her, drive inside her until they both collapsed.
Part of him knew that it was wrong—too soon, not rational, it didn’t make any sense at all--he knew it, but he didn't care. All he knew was how much he needed her, and it was all he could do to keep from ripping her shirt down the front in order to expose the silken skin of her breasts to his gaze. She murmured or moaned, a tiny sound, and tightened her hold on him, and he was lost.
"I need you," he said roughly, his voice like sandpaper. “I don’t know why or how, but I do. Please. Please.”
She put her hands on his face and pulled back a little to study his face, and the wildness and desire he saw in her unbelievably blue eyes drove him over the brink of the abyss.
"Yes," she said. One tiny word that changed his entire world.
* * *
Rose reveled in her boldness. She was acting nothing like herself. Or maybe she was acting exactly like herself. Either way, she wanted this man and this moment. She didn’t know how to believe his claims of love and forever, but she wanted to believe.
Oh, how she wanted to believe.
“Bedroom,” she gasped, just before he ripped her shirt down the middle and then fastened his lips on her nipple, right through her bra, right there in the middle of her living room. Anybody could walk in, this was crazy, this was . . .
He sucked, hard. She screamed and f
orgot about anything else beyond the feel of his mouth on her.
He lifted her up, still licking and sucking her nipple, and she instinctively wrapped her legs around his waist and hung on as he strode down the hall to her bedroom.
“Yes, please, more,” she said, gasping or whimpering or crying out, only the goddess knew which, and he tossed her on the bed and then stripped out of his clothes.
“You’re so beautiful,” she whispered, and he laughed.
“No, my sorceress, my witch, my lovely one. You are the beautiful one.” He pulled off her shoes and then her jeans, fumbling in his haste, and it was her turn to laugh.
“We have time,” she said, but then she frowned. “Mac?”
“Alaric said he’ll sleep for a day or two. Alaric is never wrong,” Alejandro said, and then he pounced on her.
His body was all hard muscle and elegant lines, and she was finally free to touch. So she did. His hot skin was a paler shade of copper where his pants had covered him, and the dark trail of hair that led down the rippling muscles of his abdomen pointed an arrow at the impressively large and deliciously hard part of him that had so intrigued her in the park.
“I don’t have much practice at this,” she said, suddenly afraid she’d disappoint him, and his face lit up with a huge smile.
“Neither do I. Let’s figure it out together.”
* * *
Alejandro was almost afraid she’d disappear right in front of his eyes. She was too wonderful to be real; too warm, too beautiful, too kind, too everything. He wanted to taste and touch every inch of her skin—brand her with his touch until she screamed his name and begged him to stay.
“I want you now,” he said, and he didn’t even recognize his own voice. “I need you. Now.”
“Yes,” she said again, and he touched and tasted and licked and sucked until she came, hard, in his hands and in his mouth, again and again, and then when he couldn’t stand it any longer, not for one single second more, he plunged into her hot, wet heat and finally, finally, he was where he belonged.
Rose wrapped her arms and legs around him and murmured encouragement, but the heat shimmering in her eyes was all the goad he needed.
“Please. Now,” she said, and he thrust home, again and again, harder and harder, until his cock was harder than it had ever been in his life and he was a heartbeat away from going over the edge. But he wanted to take her with him. He slowed to an exquisitely careful pace and reached down between them to touch that sensitive bud of nerves that he’d already learned so well.
“Come for me, querida,” he whispered, and she exploded around him; her feminine muscles clenching around his cock as her orgasm took her flying over the edge into ecstasy. Then he shouted her name over and over as he came harder than he’d even known was possible, pumping more and more of his seed into her body, until he thought he might die of pleasure.
They lay on their sides, facing each other, for minutes or hours or maybe years, until both of them could breathe again.
“Now you have to marry me,” he told her seriously. “You might be pregnant with baby Alejandro right at this very minute.”
She started to laugh, which caused her breasts to jiggle so interestingly that his cock took notice and began to get hard again.
“I’m a witch, Alejandro. We don’t get pregnant unless we want to,” she said, her eyes dancing.
“Fair enough. Then marry me because you love me.”
16
Rose almost fell off the bed. “I what? You could teach Alaric lessons in arrogance. Just because we had the hottest sex I’ve ever had in my life--"
“Or ever will, at least until the next time, which might be soon if you keep causing your lovely breasts to bounce like that,” he said, matching action to words and bending down to suck her nipple into his mouth.
She gasped and her head fell back. The man was a sex god. There was just no other way to put it. “You—you have to stop that. Oh, wow. Okay, maybe not just yet.”
He slid his clever fingers between her legs, and she surrendered completely. “Never mind. Don’t stop. Don’t—oh, goddess—don’t stop.”
He didn’t.
* * *
By the next time they were able to catch their breath, it was almost six o’clock in the evening, and Rose freaked out when she caught sight of the clock.
“My mother—Mac—oh, no,” she moaned. “They’ll think I’ve turned into a crazed sex fiend.”
“Have you?” Alejandro asked, extremely interested in the answer. “Because I think I could go one more round, if we--"
“No!” She jumped out of bed. “We have to, I need to, if we--"
“I love you,” he said simply, interrupting her wild babbling, and she froze.
“You what?”
“I love you. I’ve never met anyone like you, and I never will.” He stood up and crossed the room until he stood only a few inches away from her. “You’re brave and smart, and funny and loyal. You love your crazy grandmother and your lunatic sister, and you even care about the fate of lizard-chickens.”
The look on her face was one of pure astonishment, but he didn’t see any hint of rejection, so he took a deep breath, gathered what was left of his courage, and pushed ahead.
“I don’t know if it’s because of our magic, like Alaric said--"
“He’s never wrong,” she said wryly.
“Or because some part of your soul is perfectly matched to mine, but I love you and I need you. Marry me, my witch, my enchantress, my sorceress. Be mine. I will be faithful to you forever, and I will love you for all eternity.”
The absolute rightness of every word he was saying rang out, loud and clear, and Alejandro had never been so certain of anything in his life.
He knelt down, still stark naked, and smiled up at the woman who’d stolen his heart. “Marry me.”
Rose’s eyes widened, and an expression of pure wonder crossed her face. “I finally know,” she said, almost reverently. “Your deepest desire. It’s me.”
Relief flooded through him. “Of course.”
“But how . . .”
“Maybe all we needed was love.”
Rose opened her mouth and then shut it again, and then she blinked and looked around the room and back down at him.
“You can’t propose to me when we’re naked,” she said firmly. “Go take a shower and get dressed, and then we will go out to the garden and do this again.”
Her meaning took a minute to penetrate his brain, and then he leapt up and pulled her into his arms. “You love me,” he said triumphantly, and she smiled a secret, deliciously feminine smile.
“Maybe. Now, shower.”
“Only if you come with me.”
It turned out that she would. So it was actually another hour later when Alejandro Vasquez, fully dressed, stood in the middle of her beautiful garden and asked Rose Cardinal to marry him.
This time she said yes.
Epilogue
Atlantis, six months later
* * *
Rose and her husband sat on a low stone wall and watched, from a safe distance, as a flock of basilisks ran and played in the fantastically beautiful palace garden.
“This was the perfect solution,” she said, leaning against him, still a little drunk on the high of their most recent round of lovemaking, which had taken place in their very own guest suite in the Atlantean palace. She almost had to pinch herself to believe that it was true, but then Queen Riley walked by carrying her son and waved.
To Rose.
“A queen of a mythical lost continent just waved to me,” she said wonderingly. “To me, little Rose Cardinal of the Cardinal witches from Ohio.”
Alejandro grinned. “Not so mythical or lost anymore. Maybe you should wave back.”
“Oh! Right!” She did, enthusiastically, and then her gaze returned to the basilisks, and the shimmer of the magical force field around their enclosure. “They’re perfectly safe here, and they can’t hurt anyone.”
Alejandro shook his head. “Who would have believed that the head gardener of this wonderland could actually be almost legally blind?”
“He sees with his magic, not his eyes,” Rose told him, although he already knew, of course. “Basilisks will never be able to affect him, and he told me he actually likes them a lot. Treats them as pets.”
Alejandro pulled her closer and kissed her again, and her heartbeat sped up like it did every single time he kissed her.
“Speaking of pets, I think we should get a dog to play with Bob,” Alejandro said. “I’ve always wanted a dog. And you owe me, since Gianni glares at me every time we go for pizza.”
It was true. Gianni had never gotten over his initial dislike of Alejandro. Maybe someday. The man was more than a hundred years old. It might just take some time.
“Dog?” Alejandro prompted.
“We can,” Rose said slowly. “But we might be a little busy in a few months, so maybe we can adopt an older dog who won’t be as demanding.”
Alejandro, enjoying his first vacation from his new job at the Cincinnati office of P-Ops, looked puzzled. “What do you mean? Big witches conclave? Granny secretly planning to learn how to drive race cars?”
Rose smiled and shared another, altogether different secret, and then she had to kiss away the single tear that her big, strong, alpha male husband let fall as he placed his hand on her belly and the new life starting inside her.
“Together, forever,” he said, his voice husky, repeating the words he told her every single day. The words that were inscribed inside her wedding ring.
“Maybe our baby can be friends with the little prince,” she said, and then she froze. “Do you remember--"
“Your grandmother’s prophecy?”
“Oh, no. ‘Your eldest child will rule in an isle of myth’,” Rose said. “You don’t think—surely not?”
